


Optimize This

by stephanericher



Series: SASO 17 [11]
Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-11
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-11-12 20:32:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11169531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: Kasamatsu is a Bay Area software engineer. Kise is the local basketball star and an investor in his employer.





	Optimize This

**Author's Note:**

> for saso br1, original prompt [here](https://sportsanime.dreamwidth.org/21931.html?thread=11183019#cmt11183019)

Ten in the morning, and Kasamatsu finally has time to stretch and go for a coffee break. He’s been on calls with customers on the east coast pretty much all morning while his coworkers fire the damn nerf gun in the background, explaining that yes he’s being paid to create this but they’re the ones who keep changing the requirements, and at a certain point he’d just put himself on mute and let the analysts take care of smoothing things over. Still, it means they have to go back to the drawing board, add this new functionality that they should have known about weeks ago, and pretend the system is amazing just because they can cram more buzzwords into it.   
  
“Yukio! There you are!”  
  
Kasamatsu tells his body not to stiffen, but he’s not sure it works too well. He gets along better with women now than he did as a kid, but even so (and even after working here for several hears) the company’s PR director is intimidating, taller than him without heels, blazer cinched around her impossibly-tiny waist. She’s followed by an even more unbelievably tall and beautiful person, and for a second Kasamatsu kind of wants to pinch himself. Ryouta Kise, three-time NBA champion and last year’s MVP runner-up, the star of the Golden State Warriors, is standing in the kitchen of Kasamatsu’s office, and Kasamatsu’s about to spill his coffee all over.  
  
“This is one of our new investors, Mr. Kise; he’s a basketball player.”  
  
(Kasamatsu almost snorts; she’s laying it on thick but they all know who he is.)  
  
“He’s here to find out a little bit more about the company, and we were hoping you could show him around?”  
  
The IMs from east coast are going to be piling up in Jabber if he takes the time, but Warriors or no (and even if Kise is as much of a snobby airhead as he comes off as in interviews) this is ten times better than explaining the same damn code to another developer, only for them to ask him to change it back to the way that didn’t work for the fifth time.  
  
“Sure. Welcome,” Kasamatsu says, sticking out his hand.  
  
“Please call me Ryouta!” Kise chirps; his hand is soft and he smells like some fancy floral cologne.  
  
He’s dressed in an outfit that’s got to be worth a sizeable chunk of Kasamatsu’s salary, linen pants and a button-down shirt with an admittedly tasteful designer logo on the hem, soft-looking blue t-shirt underneath. He’s got way too much jewelry, though, and garish giant sunglasses perched atop his head. Kasamatsu still feels a little bit underdressed in his jeans, plaid button-down bought at a Uniqlo sale, and FitBit clipped to his belt.   
  
The PR chief head out, and Kasamatsu exhales. “This is the kitchen. You want coffee, tea, water?”  
  
“On, no thanks,” says Kise, pulling out a glass bottle of expensive mineral something from his leather tote bag.   
  
Kasamatsu raises an eyebrow, but he’s seen weirder shit. He turns, waiting for Kise to follow.  
  
“You’re Yukio, right?”  
  
“Right,” says Kasamatsu. “I’m a dev lead on the healthcare archive project.”  
  
“Oh,” says Kise, and Kasamatsu’s got experience hearing exactly when he’s lost people in details from their tones of voice (but this is pretty early); he’s about to launch into an explanation because Kise is an investor and they always need the money, but Kise asks first. “So you do, like, code?”  
  
“Yeah. Database development. I help load data from tables into other tables and combine them with other data so that it’s easier for customers to get one flat view of just the attributes they need.”  
  
“So, like, you pick all that data from the same person and put it together?”  
  
“Yeah. Sounds simple, but when you have billions of rows, and you’re trying to match a bunch of different IDs in a bunch of different formats it gets pretty complicated.”  
  
“Huh,” says Kise.  
  
Kasamatsu gestures toward the executive offices, frosted glass hiding the bay view windows. “This is where our execs are. They’re the only ones here who get offices; the rest of us are in the agile floorspace.”  
  
“Yeah, I read the company website. They said you don’t believe in cubicles?”  
  
Sometimes, Kasamatsu would very much like a cubicle; he thinks back to his internship at a tiny insurance firm back home in Pennsylvania, where the pay wasn’t great but the cost of living was fucking reasonable and he had privacy to get things done, no IMs and noisy coworkers and privacy when he’d wanted to roll his eyes.   
  
“They’re not the ones working in the open,” Kasamatsu mutters, and shit.   
  
He looks back to Kise; Kise laughs. “I know just how you feel! It’s like when the GM talks to the media about salary and amenities, but he just doesn’t get it.”  
  
It’s not the same thing at all, but Kasamatsu doesn’t argue. Kise’s an investor; he’s giving them money; he can dream about colocated coworkers on the same project as him. They turn the corner into the first open area; the low murmur of people talking on headsets and to each other is familiar but still irritating even though Kasamatsu’s not doing any work.  
  
“This is a mobile agile workspace, so we’re not assigned desks. Usually everyone takes the same space anyway, but we have lockers and stuff to store our stuff. We work with a lot of customers overseas or on the east coast, so everyone’s on calls a lot.”  
  
“Are they all writing code?”  
  
“Nah, some of them are analysts, scrum masters, POs…”  
  
He’s lost Kise again, but Kise doesn’t ask this time and Kasamatsu doesn’t feel like explaining, especially because it’s hard to explain agile without trying to explain why they’d bother to do it in the first place, which Kasamatsu doesn’t know how to sugarcoat. It’s just another buzzword that executives like because they don’t have to change what they’re doing, an excuse to overload the people at the bottom and change requirements and priorities on them every five seconds (which, in theory, Agile should deal with, but in practice it’s like no one’s ever fucking heard of a sprint commitment or an interation).  
  
“Anyway,” says Kasamatsu. “We have some fun stuff, too. Ping-pong room, a room with a PS4 and a few games, that kind of thing.”  
  
“Oh! So you get to have fun breaks!”  
  
Kasamatsu snorts. “Yeah, if you’ve got time.”  
  
(He’s already working nine or ten hours; the rest of his time belongs to him and he’s not going to stay an extra few minutes at work when he can game at home.)  
  
“What about your lunch break?”  
  
“What lunch break?”  
  
Kise looks horrified. Kasamatsu remembers way back when, at twenty-two with green around his ears, he’d expected a lunch break. He’d expected to be here nine-to-five with an hour of lunch included, not six-to-three on a good day with a couple of ten-minute breaks where he can get them. This tour’s been fucking long already (five minutes?); he can feel the work piling up but shoves it out of his mind.  
  
“I have work to do, calls to be on,” says Kasamatsu. “It’s the nature of the industry.”  
  
“Oh,” says Kise. “Is there anything I can do?”  
  
“Give me a bigger team and better customers? I don’t know,” says Kasamatsu. “Thanks, though.”  
  
Kise looks like he’s seriously considering it, and Kasamatsu wonders how much money he’s investing, how much say he has over where it goes, how loudly his money talks.   
  
“Say, do you like basketball?” says Kise.  
  
“Kind of,” says Kasamatsu. “I played a bit when I was younger. Got fed up with the Sixers, though.”  
  
“What about the Warriors?”  
  
“They left Philly behind, so I can’t like them,” says Kasamatsu.  
  
Kise gasps. “So mean!”  
  
Kasamatsu rolls his eyes without thinking, and then he realizes how easy it’s been to act his normal self around a celebrity like Kise, how much Kise has put him at ease. It’s a dangerous kind of charm, and, well, Kise isn’t nearly as much of an annoying airhead as he seems. It’s weird, and Kasamatsu’s not sure he likes it.  
  
“Where’s your desk?” says Kise.  
  
“We don’t have assigned desks,” says Kasamatsu, snideness creeping into his tone.  
  
His desk is mostly unadorned; agile or no he has no desire to keep his shit here. His phone’s charging, hooked up to the dock; his laptop’s open and sleeping, unplugged from the extra monitors right now. Two desks away, Moriyama’s is covered in crap, a tissue box and a couple of coffee mugs, two extra trackpads and a wireless keyboard along with a Raiders bobblehead. Right next to his is Kobori’s, a water bottle and a pile of instruction manuals that won’t fit in the laughably tiny lockers they’re assigned (as much as Kasamatsu hates his job, he’d probably hate being a mainframe developer more) and that stupid nerf gun sitting on top. They’re probably in meetings (their laptops are gone) or on the breaks they somehow get to take.  
  
“That’s mostly it,” says Kasamatsu. “The bathrooms are right by the kitchen if you need.”  
  
“Cool!” Kise chirps. “Thank you so much, Yukio.”  
  
No, Kise saying his name does not do anything to Kasamatsu’s insides; why would it?  
  
“By the way,” Kise says, just as he turns to go. “When do you get off?”  
  
“Three, maybe,” says Kasamatsu.   
  
“Could you make it definitely?” says Kise. “I know this great bar a few streets over, if you’d like to go for a drink.”  
  
He’s still close enough to smell his cologne; Kasamatsu tries not to inhale too deeply. He might be dense about these things sometimes, but this sounds an awful lot like a date.  
  
“Deal,” says Kasamatsu.  
  
“See you then!” says Kise. “I’ll meet you in the lobby.”  
  
Kasamatsu’s got four or five hours to process it, but first he’s got to process this fucking data—there’s going to be plenty of time while his query’s running, though, more than enough to wonder just what the hell he’s gotten into.


End file.
